This remark will apply as well to numerous other searches which you will have to make in books. The table of contents will commonly take note of all the more salient topics that are treated in the book, whether of persons, of places, of notable scenes, historic events, etc., and so will aid you in finding what you seek. In the last resort only, in the books whose table of contents fails you, will you have to turn the leaves page by page, which, while not equivalent to reading the book through, is a time-consuming business. Of course no librarian can devote hours of his precious time to searches in such detail for readers. They are to be supplied with the books likely to contain what they are in search of, and left to seek it in their own way, with such hints and cautions as to saving time by taking the shortest road, as the experience of the librarian enables him to supply. The suggestions here given are not needed by scholarly readers, but are the fruits of long experience in searching books for what they contain. Again, let us take the case of a call by a reader who happens to be a decorative painter, for patterns which may furnish him hints in finishing an interior of a house. Of course he wants color--that is, not theory only, but illustration, or practical examples. So you put before him Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament, or Racinet's _L'Ornement polychrome_, both illustrated with many beautiful designs in color, which he is delighted to find. Another reader is anxious to see a picture of "St. George and the Dragon." If you have the "Museum of Painting and Sculpture," in 17 volumes, or Champlin's "Cyclopaedia of Painters and Painting," a dictionary of art in four volumes, you find it in either work, in the alphabet, under "St. George," and his want is satisfied. A youngster wants to know how to build a boat, and you find him Folkard on Boats, or Frazar's Sail-boats, which describe and figure various styles of water-craft. Perhaps an inquisitive reader wants to find out all about the families of the various languages, and what is known of their origin, and you supply him with W. D. Whitney's "Life and Growth of Language," or Max Mueller's "Science of Language," either of which furnishes full information. Another inquirer seeks for information about the aggregate debts of nations. You give him the great quarto volume of the last Census on Wealth and Indebtedness, or for still later information the Statesman's Year Book for 1899, or the Almanach de Gotha for the current year, both of which contain the comparative debts of nations at the latest dates. The inquirer who seeks to know the rates of wages paid for all kinds of labor in a series of several years, can be supplied with the elaborate Report on Labor and Wages for fifty-two years, published by the U. S. Government in 1893, in four volumes.